CIO Trevor Attridge joins Young & Rubicam

Trevor Attridge, left with SThree CIO Lance Fisher and Bill Wilkins of First Utility at an event organised by the Horizon CIO podcast Editor

Trevor Attridge has joined marketing and communications leaders Young & Rubicam as CIO. For the last two years Attridge has been EMEA CIO for the GroupM marketing agency.

Young & Rubicam is a major marketing agency in the WPP portfolio, with 16,000 employees, the business, founded in the USA, is noted as being the first producers of a colour television advert. Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP acquired Young & Rubicam in the Year 2000. Young & Rubicam own and operate a number of public relations (PR) agencies including Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe.

Attridge has spent the majority of his career as a business technology leader in marketing and he has been with the WPP empire since 2013. GroupM, which Attridge moved to in October 2015, is reported to be the world’s largest advertising organisation in terms of billing.

Before moving to GroupM Attridge was Global Director of Data and Technology at MEC, the world’s second largest media agency and part of the WPP group. Attridge spent over four years with MEC and in that time had a strong data focus and introduced hackathons. Attridge invited this scibe to the inaugural MEC hackathon where product and technology teams from across the global organisation worked alongside analysts and experts from the Leading Edge Forum (LEF) to investigate news ways of working.

Attridge said hackathons gave the organisation a chance to “get a feel for new technology. Unless you can touch it; it is difficult to ascertain how it is relevant and it is a chance to remove the hype”. The CIO went on to deliver a number of hackathons at the London headquarters of MEC.

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